Losing a dog....losing my dog .....losing Bruno

How many of us, when frustrated with life simply wish that we were dead ! Sometimes life shows you the true meaning of your words. My little dog of 12 years is suffering from cancer, now quite rapidly and steadily plummeting towards his death.

We had hardly believed he would survive so long - the mass of cancerous cells swelling into a tumor, ebbing away on excision, and reappearing with mightier force the next time around. I had not dared to hope of seeing him alive when I arrived home. And yet there he was, to welcome me, possibly for the last time. Remarkably thinner, with a white bandage masking the left foreleg, where he had undergone repeated excisions to keep the cancerous mass under control.

As I said life shows you - even though I argued with Maa, that Bruno was so alive because he didn't know what was plaguing him, that he was dying, I or for that matter everyone of us everyday would bow to the spirit of life in him...... whether slobbering over chicken rolls and forcing us to give him two thirds of what we ate, or shaking his head with his favorite moo pillow tight in his teeth in that "bullish" way to play with us or refusing to come home when we was taken out for his walk or sniffing out a cat and chasing it till it had run out of the neighborhood..... it seemed all he wanted to do was live...... for the simplest pleasures of life as he knew them.

It's hard to accept death, even when day in and day out you see someone waning in front of your eyes. And that is when it hits you with its solemnity. Something beyond your control and fighting, something that is really not jokeworthy at all, the gap which death creates can never be filled up. Ofcourse these are all known and morose thoughts and that is why it is best left unsaid, best not dwelt upon, but "accepted".

Let's leave it at that though and move on to more cheerful thoughts and memories....... here is a video link to Bruno's forays into the Bay of Bengal, last month.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V5rZuUq7CM

Bruno is one of the most avid fans of road trips, and that's what we did. We took him to Mandarmoni by car. He loved the trip (in his own excited way of barking continuously at everything in sight) and he loved the ocean even more. We love you Bruno and will always miss you. You became so much a part of our lives that we dread how life will be without you and dread the gap that your going away will create.

Bruno and I parted proximity when I boarded my flight back here, but he is still fighting out his last few days back home. The malignancy has attacked his lungs and is manifesting as respiratory distress. I don't know how many days he has left ... but I pray that the ones he has left are to some extent painless.